Ok I started a Hamachi network for CAW multiplayer. I beg admins to make this thread sticky because I'd really like to see CAW MP get popular....

Network name is: Carriers at War Password: spruance

Now assuming most people here are not familiar with Hamachi here are short instructions for this simple and effective way to play MP games over the Internet.

What is Hamachi?

Hamachi is virtual LAN for MP games. You connect to the Internet, you start Hamachi, and from that moment on, you're on virtual LAN (local area network) and can play games over the Internet as if you're playing them with someone in the next room. Your regular Internet services (web, mail etc) remain unaffected.

What are benefits of Hamachi over using the "regular" Internet connection?

With Hamachi you connect and play as if you're on LAN, connection is usually more stable, Hamachi has integrated chat client, and it's easier to start the game, because all games available on LAN are visible in the game lobby (you don't have to ask people for their IP address).

OK, after you download and install Hamachi, start the software and you should see something like this:

You won't see any game lobbies like those pictured above because you're not a member - yet.

Click on the button with triangle in the bottom right corner and pick Join existing network. Enter Carriers at War as network name, and spruance as password.

Voila, you just joined CAW Hamachi online lobby. If I am online at the moment, you'll see me + any other player who is online. Otherwise (if I am not online) you should see my name but it will probably be greyed out. Same goes for other members of course.

I think my Hamachi nick is yamato, although I might change it to something more carrier-friendly

If you want to challenge someone to MP game, click on his name, and choose Ping or Chat. Chat a little (keyboard chat), arrange a game. Start CAW, Multiplayer, and you should see hosted Hamachi games in the LAN browser. Play the game. Get sunk, play again, lose your job, divorce your wife....

Believe me - online gaming does not get any easier than this (in fact it does, for games that have organic server browser but lets not go there )

Lets do this, we need a critical mass of online afficionados to make the game popular

Me and AVisme tried to start a game using Hamachi last night but we didn't succeed. However, we used Hamachi to communicate (chat) and started the game using the regular TCP/IP comnnection and IP address, it worked and it was fantastic.

Further experimentation with Hamachi is needed.

So I'd suggest you install Hamachi following instructions in this thread - it costs nothing, and at the very least you'll see growing list of names of people interested in playing MP CAW, and then you can contact them, challenge them to a game, and still connect using the "old school" IP. I noticed SSG vice president on the Hamachi list too.

Any reason I dont see my name on the members list ? Also-I get a timed out message all the time when clicking on another member, does that just mean they are allready playing and you cant get into the game ? Thanks

You don't see your name on the list by design. But you're logged in if you see your name in the Hamachi top bar.

Yes, some members cannot be pinged even though they are online. Apparently, these members will have problems playing the game over Hamachi as well. Most probably they need to reconfigure their router, open some ports etc. Members than can be pinged - these should be able to play the game with no problems (so pinging is a good latmus test, sort of).

AVisme and I played Coral Sea to completion via Hamachi - considering we were on the opposite ends of the earth it worked really well - we had one disconnect but we loaded up the auto save file and were up and running again within seconds.

I don't think so. Because once the game loads it works fine. (If the packets are getting lost, it would crash or have all sorts of problems mid-game.) It crashes on map loading.

We did manage to finish a game of Eastern Solomons later, whe I was the host (me & AVisme). BTW when the MP game starts, if you see the usual loading scene accompanied with aircraft or a ship, it will be fine. In 50% of cases (based on my experience with AVIsme, my only MP partner so far ) though, there is no loading screen, just gray texture all over the screen, and then I know the map is not going to load, and the game will crash.

We had that 3-4 times in a row with East Solomons or Santa Cruz, so I believed it's something related to those maps, but then we managed to play a game of East Solomons with me as host so.....

I'm stuck either with 1.5Mb Satellite @ ~900ms latency or friggin' dial-up. Sadly, dial-up is usually better for the few real-time games that it can actually run on.

To reply to this - game uses laughably small amount of bandwith. After sweating heavily vs AVisme for 1,5 hours my bandwidth meter reports 1,5 MB upload, and same amount of download. Part of that was made even before we started the game.

Indeed, since response time appears to be much more important than bandwidth, I think dial up will serve you MUCH better than satellite. I plan to test the dial-up-friendliness of this game this summer when I retreat on a vacation on "my" island with a laptop With network traffic THIS low, there should be no problems.

hmm well the only time I have seen troubles getting a multi player game going is trying to resume a game off a crashed save game file - in which case we roll back to the save game file previous to the crash one.

Also, if one of you have had a CTD then it would be wise for the other player to exit the game and fire it up again before trying again.

I played AVisme last night, the game went on for what - 2 hrs? Latency was around 285ms (this would be about right as SX cable from SYD to LAX is a fraction less than that). We did have one crash but it resumed nicely from the crash save game file.

So keep sending in those crash file reports, Alex will see us right :-)

Even though crashes are frustrating, there's one thing developers need to be praised to heavens for.

The safeguard mechanisms against "losing" the game due to crash are fantastic - tons of auto saves, both in SP and MP, auto save on crash, different save and auto save folders neatly organized....

I love that. If only every other game would be like that. Most devs seem to take this overconfident approach "it won't happen" and never take care to proof the game against crashing using simplest of methods - auto saves.

ORIGINAL: AVisme both fun games, even if all my CV's rust on the bottom !

This last game was great, and your play was fantastic. After losing two carriers, what you did with Wasp only would go into legends of naval warfare. You even managed to stop the invasion of Guadalcanal

However, losing that many carriers caught up with you in the end

I don't know how old your PC is, but the game seems to be quite undemanding as regards the hardware.

During development we tested with modem speeds (one of our testers had his cable capped) and there wasnt any real problems. The messages we send are quite small - and only when the player issues an order. Glad you like the autosave options - you have Gregor to thank for that one. They were even more useful during development when people were bug reporting!